Lifestyle Action Plan – part 1

An action plan is a list of steps designed to take you from where you are to where you want to be.

The most important part of any action plan comes after you compile it. It will be no more than a piece of paper with words on it unless you actually take action on the things you list in the plan.

Use a piece of paper, a journal or the template available in the Everyday Productivity Workbook to draw up your Lifestyle Action Plan, using the findings from your Lifestyle Self-Audit.

Subscribe to Everyday Business Skillsto download a FREE copy of the Lifestyle Self-Audit and Lifestyle Action Plan worksheets from the Everyday Productivity Workbook, and be the first to know when Everyday Productivity is available for purchase.

Health and fitness

Write down the steps you intend to take to either maintain or improve your current level of health and fitness.

Exercise

Be as realistic as possible. If you need to lose some weight, by all means set yourself a weight goal but don’t kid yourself you can do it in a few weeks. Go back and read some of those sites you found searching online for ‘body weight’ to help you work out a realistic time frame. If it’s a long time since you exercised regularly, start with walking for ten minutes a day instead of rushing off and joining the gym. We’re talking about establishing new habits. They take time.

Eating

If you don’t do the cooking in your household, discuss your plans with the cook. If you eat out or buy take away all the time, consider learning to cook or reverting to home cooked meals. Do some research online to get an understanding of what healthy eating looks like. Hint: fresh food figures in it a lot. If you have no idea when it comes to cooking, let me suggest a little book I wrote for guys living alone: Cooking 4 One. It’s about the basic processes. Cooking is not that difficult but, again, it’s a choice.

Looking after your brain chemistry

Alcohol

Recreational drugs

Narcotics

Medicines

If you want to be productive and to lead a healthy life, you’re not going to make it while you’re abusing your brain.

If you need to take action to address substance abuse, it will not be easy, and you will need to be honest enough with yourself to seek help.

Cigarettes

If you want to give up smoking, type ‘smoking consciously’ into your search engine of choice for information on how you can quit.

This is a draft of material that will eventually appear in Everyday Productivity, the next title in my Everyday Business Skills books. Please feel free to offer feedback in the comments.

Yes, people have known about this for thousands of years but it seems we’re a forgetful lot. It seems it’s easier to indulge yourself than take proper care of yourself – even if that course of action makes you sick. As always, it’s a choice and we each get to choose.